The Alienist - Caleb Carr [15]
We passed through the sliding iron doors and into the men’s ward, and followed the attendant Fuller to the last cell on the left. He stood to the side and opened the small observation window in the heavily banded door. “Wolff!” he called. “Visitors for you. Official business, so behave.”
Kreizler stood before the window looking inward, and I watched over his shoulder. Inside the small, bare-walled cell a man sat on a rough cot, under which lay a dented steel chamber pot. Heavy bars covered the one small window, and ivy obscured the little external light that tried to enter. A metal pitcher of water and a tray bearing a bit of bread and an oatmeal-encrusted bowl lay on the floor near the man, whose head was in his hands. He wore only an undershirt and woolen pants without a belt or suspenders (suicide being the worry). Heavy shackles were clamped around his wrists and ankles. When he lifted his face, a few seconds after Fuller’s call, he revealed a pair of red eyes that reminded me of some of my worst mornings; and his deeply lined, whiskered face bore an expression of detached resignation.
“Mr. Wolff,” Kreizler said, watching the man carefully. “Are you sober?”
“Who wouldn’t be?” the man answered slowly, his words indistinct, “after a night in this place?”
Kreizler closed the small iron gate that covered the window and turned to Fuller. “Has he been drugged?”
Fuller shrugged uncomfortably. “He was raving when they brought him in, Dr. Kreizler. Seemed more than just drunk, the superintendent said, so they jabbed him full of chloral.”
Kreizler sighed in deep irritation. Chloral hydrate was one of the banes of his existence, a bitter-tasting, neutrally colored, somewhat caustic compound that slowed the rate of the heart and thus made the subject singularly calm—or, if used as it was in many saloons, almost comatose and an easy target for robbery or kidnapping. The body of the medical community, however, insisted that chloral did not cause addiction (Kreizler violently disagreed); and at twenty-five cents a dose, it was a cheap and convenient alternative to wrestling a patient into chains or a leather harness. It was therefore used with abandon, especially on mentally disturbed or simply violent subjects; but in the twenty-five years since its introduction, its use had spread to the general public, who were free, in those days, to buy not only chloral, but morphine, opium, cannabis indica, or any other such substance at any drugstore. Many thousands of people had destroyed their lives by freely surrendering to chloral’s power to “release one from worry and care, and bring on healthful sleep” (as one manufacturer put it). Death by overdose had become common; more and more suicides were connected to chloral use; and yet the doctors of the day continued blithely to insist on its safety and utility.
“How many grains?” Kreizler asked, exchanging weariness for annoyance—he was aware that administration of the drug was neither Fuller’s job nor his fault.
“They began with twenty,” the attendant answered sheepishly. “I told them, sir, I told them you were scheduled for the evaluation and that you’d be angry, but—well, you know, sir.”
“Yes,” Kreizler answered quietly, “I know.” Which made three of us—and what we knew was